that storm water must run from the south side to the north and lie there.  It does, and the north side has recently met the trouble by putting down raw flints, and so converting what would be a lake into a sort of flint pudding.  Consequently one drives one’s car as much as possible on the south side of this road.  There is a suggestion of hostility and repartee between north and south side in this arrangement, which the explorer’s inquiries will confirm.  It may be only an accidental parallelism with profounder fact; I do not know.  But the middle of this high road is a frontier.  The south side belongs to the urban district of Braintree; the north to the rural district of Bocking.

If the curious inquirer will take pick and shovel he will find at any rate one corresponding dualism below the surface.  He will find a Bocking water main supplying the houses on the north side and a Braintree water main supplying the south.  I rather suspect that the drains are also in duplicate.  The total population of Bocking and Braintree is probably little more than thirteen thousand souls altogether, but for that there are two water supplies, two sets of schools, two administrations.

To the passing observer the rurality of the Bocking side is indistinguishable from the urbanity of the Braintree side; it is just a little muddier.  But there are dietetic differences.  If you will present a Bocking rustic with a tin of the canned fruit that is popular with the Braintree townsfolk, you discover one of these differences.  A dustman perambulates the road on the Braintree side, and canned food becomes possible and convenient therefore.  But the Braintree grocers sell canned food with difficulty into Bocking.  Bocking, less fortunate than its neighbour, has no dustman apparently, and is left with the tin on its hands.  It can either bury it in its garden—­if it has a garden—­take it out for a walk wrapped in paper and drop it quietly in a ditch, if possible in the Braintree area, or build a cairn with it and its predecessors and successors in honour of the Local Government Board (President L5,000, Parliamentary Secretary L1,500, Permanent Secretary L2,000, Legal Adviser L1,000 upward, a total administrative expenditure of over L300,000 ...).  In death Bocking and Braintree are still divided.  They have their separate cemeteries....

Now to any disinterested observer there lies about the Braintree-Bocking railway station one community.  It has common industries and common interests.  There is no octroi or anything of that sort across the street.  The shops and inns on the Bocking side of the main street are indistinguishable from those on the Braintree side.  The inhabitants of the two communities intermarry freely.  If this absurd separation did not exist, no one would have the impudence to establish it now.  It is wasteful, unfair (because the Bocking piece is rather better off than Braintree and with fewer people, so that there is a difference in the rates), and for nine-tenths of the community it is more or less of a nuisance.